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Views on Publishing

Consider Twitter Fiction

Many recent literary critics have condemned Twitter, citing it as the main cause of death for poetry in the 21st century. However, literature on the Internet can be easy to find if one knows where to look. Consider the Twitter account @Pentametron. Creator Ranjit Bhatnagar “has created an algorithm that scans Twitter for stress patterns and rhyme, and culls from it perfect fourteen-line Elizabethan sonnets” (see issue 14 of Wag’s Revue for more on @Pentametron). The blend between the traditional poetic form and modern slang is something that needs to be seen to be appreciated. These makeshift sonnets, according to Will Guzzardi and Travis Smith, are “haunting and funny and inspired and banal all at once” (Wag’s Revue). In other words, they are the digital, everyday answer to a poetically indifferent world.

The idea of Twitter being the answer to the perceived decline of the novel in the 21st century has been explored in different ways. Outdated poetry forms such as the gogyohka and haibun, as well as the ever-present haiku, have been revived in journals published on Twitter and small blogs. Other sites publish exclusively speculative fiction pieces, which when compressed are actually quite impressive and captivating. Some of my first published pieces were on these sites such as Trapeze Magazine, One Forty Fiction, Literary Juice, and Extract(s).

I first heard about the concept of micro fiction during my junior year of high school in an Advanced Creative Writing class taught by Nick Ripatrazone (two of his students were published in Hint Fiction for pieces completed in class). Looking through the anthology now, I notice a striking difference between the stories written by established writers such as Joyce Carol Oates and James Frey and the stories written by Ripatrazone’s students. Oates’s story, for example, lacks the sort of immediate punch that can be found in the stories of David Joseph (who appears in the anthology twice).

I can’t help but think of William Faulkner’s interview in the 1956 issue of The Paris Review where he states, "I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing."

Times have clearly changed. Young writers today are wired to think in terms of bite-sized data. Nick Ripatrazone once explained to me that unraveling a poem is like taking apart a lawnmower and putting it back together again: you need to look at each line of the poem like a piece of some larger machine with its own purpose before you can begin to imagine the lawnmower as a whole. But who has time for that?

With mobile-ready quarterlies and weekly updated fiction columns that can fit in your pocket, even the physical dimensions of literature have shrunk to make both writing and reading a way to pass the time during life’s brief commercial breaks. Indeed, many online magazines won’t accept stories of more than 2,500 words and often prefer works of under 1,500. Stories ranging above the 5,000 word count are often found in science fiction magazines or the more selective print mags.

I’ll admit when I first signed up for Twitter, I didn’t see it as a poetic vehicle. It wasn’t until I started looking for places to get published that I found a market for these unbelievably short pieces. While I had been introduced to Hint Fiction, I was under the assumption that the market for stories that small was nonexistent.

When I discovered the magazines dedicated exclusively to Twitter fiction (Trapeze, Outshine, Nanoism, 7 x 20, escarp, and more), I was a bit hesitant at first. Some of the stories revealed themselves to me after only a second reading, almost like a clever punchline. Those were the easy ones. Others held entire mythos beyond their words, whole novels’ worth of characters and relationships and whatever else captured in under 140 characters. I was floored. I would show them to my friends and, like a Rorschach, we all saw something different but equally evocative and telling. There was no way I could do that. But I tried anyway. I wrote pieces everywhere, in every margin. Stories, haikus, one scene plays, anything as long as I could Tweet it. If I didn’t like a word, I didn’t erase it, I rewrote the entire thing and in doing so found something else I didn’t like until I could decide whether a piece was perfect or garbage.

Slowly, my pieces started creeping up on the Internet. In my mind, I counted these as “half-publications”, but I believe they helped get me started and gave me the confidence to submit my full-length pieces to bigger markets.

One of the great things about submitting Twitter fiction is that the response time from the editors, for obvious reasons, is swifter than most markets. I have also found that many editors are more inclined to give you personal feedback on a rejection, considering they can point out specifics in a piece quite easily. I even had an editor once change the perspective of one of my pieces for me. A very slight modification, but I found that it made the piece much more developed and was grateful.

For me--and I think most young writers could benefit from this--the appeal of Twitter fiction is the “I could do that” factor. Most “Tweeters” don’t realize that, as I’m sure Andy Warhol would be apt to say, their Tweets are literature. The hierarchy of events that are “Twitter worthy” versus “Facebook/Instagram worthy” is clear to a person who has grown up in a world where every moment is evaluated based on an unseen Internet points system (or, in other words, the amount of “Favorites” or “Likes” a post gets). But this classification in and of itself is worth examining for it says a lot about how we weigh our social “texts”. After writing a fair amount of Twitter fiction, I can distinguish in my head a story that needs to be fleshed out in a longer form from one that can be told in three sentences or less.

The concept of Twitter fiction may seem superficial to many because it can literally be done by anyone and, quite frankly, it goes against the established realms of highbrow literary art that dominate most lauded magazines. Personally I find the two forms to be proportional. A great Twitter fiction piece can be written in fifteen minutes and read in thirty seconds, while a great story can take fifteen days to write and thirty minutes to read. It balances out.

The problem with applying what Faulkner is talking about in The Paris Review interview is that not only are young writers today more in tune with the fast pace of the world, so are readers. Now, with information and media being flung at us at every turn, the idea of sitting down and reading a story that is masking in symbolism what a blogger does much more clearly is intimidating and counterproductive to the common (non-)reader. With Twitter fiction, that epiphanic moment where the piece clicks and you suddenly know the entire story without really knowing much at all is something that is hard to find in contemporary literature.

The act of capturing an entire narrative through an isolated scene is a writer’s way of stopping to smell the roses. Behind every Tweet, no matter how insignificant, is a motivation inspired by an event: “Someone is going to read this, and I am either going to filter or not filter what I say depending on how much I care about what my followers think of me.” To put it in semiotic terms, a Tweet is a way to understand the unclear signifiers of the world by cataloguing them into subjective signified concepts through compressed text. Twitter fiction accomplishes the same thing but on a greater scale.

If I could give any advice to aspiring high school writers, it would be this: Yes, write all the time. Write as much as you possibly can without it disrupting your schoolwork or relationships (I’ve learned the perils of the latter the hard way.) Also, read everything, especially the things you don’t understand. Read the classics. Read Wallace and Joyce and read criticism of Wallace and Joyce because it will make you a better writer for doing so. But write what you are. I, too, was raised on sugar and billboards. Take advantage of the fact that writing Twitter fiction is easier and more fun than polishing a fifteen page story. The days of full-length manuscripts and short story collections are far, far away, so embrace the attention deficit of the 21st century, because that person who anxiously checks their phone at every red light may just be your newest fan.

Anthony Santulli is currently a senior at Bridgewater-Raritan High School in New Jersey. He will be studying creative writing at Susquehanna University in the fall. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in over a dozen magazines including Extract(s), bioStories, The Postscript Journal, the delinquent, Bartleby Snopes, Literary Orphans, and decomP.